Death Wave Is Here

Finally took the plunge and published Death Wave for the Kindle. It's a tale of adultery, betrayal and revenge set in the days of the Great Depression. And there's a death ray.

The novel is a throwback to the gritty paperback thrillers of yesteryear, short and sweet and a very fast read. It starts out light and turns brutal as it goes, so don't expect the sample chapters on Hero Go Home to give you an idea of the tone of the entire book.

If you don't have a Kindle, don't worry. Amazon has software you can use on your PC or on other mobile devices and smartphones. The book is in mobi format, so you can also use Mobipocket reader software, if you have it. Best part of all (for you) is that because the book is short, it's priced at a low $2.99. That's less than a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carls Jr., and because it's an electronic file, there are no delivery charges added. You can't beat that.

Pieces of a Larger Puzzle

So I wrote recently about the idea of publishing Death Wave myself, and I tied it into the idea of finally going out and making this writing stuff that I do actually earn me a living.

Two big problems with that:

Number one, it's scary.

And number two, I've not been very good at it so far.

I mean, the DIY ethos sounds great when you're discussing it around beers late at night, but it's not as if I haven't tried it before. Blue Falcon went nowhere. Hero Go Home, the webcomic, fizzled (partly because I was still learning about pacing, partly because I had other things taking up a lot of my time, but also largely because I enjoy writing much more than drawing, and the art was a shit-ton of work for very mediocre result). Even this blog, which was basically started as an attempt to let folks get to know me and maybe build a following, is basically read by my friends and no one else (not counting the dozens of folks who visit once while searching for pics of the Barbi Twins or Tig Ol' Bitties).

But here I am with time on my hands and a desire to do more, go farther, than I have before. So I'm working on a few projects. I haven't figured out which one I want to lead with yet, aside from one small announcement I'll be making very soon.

One is publishing Death Wave. It's more or less ready to go right now. It could use an editing pass, and needs some other work, but most of the heavy lifting has already been done.

Another is perhaps publishing an anthology of Digger Universe stories. I don't have a lot of those so far. There are basically four that have been published (three starring Digger and one starring Digger's former teammate AcroCop), plus another that was started but never finished, another that has been basically plotted but not written, and another unrelated story that also features supers and could easily fit into the universe with a couple of tweaks. So that's seven, which is not really enough for a proper anthology, but could serve as a chapbook or something that could be the seed for future development. But since all the writing hasn't really been done yet, it's not as "shovel-ready" as Death Wave is.

Another possibility is finally doing another draft of Hero Go Home. I still take out the idea and mess with it, trying to find a way to make it work. I really want to make it work, although two bad drafts has pretty much scared me away from it. But if there was interest in the Digger anthology, I could certainly see myself writing this up as a follow-up. If there was interest in that, I might even figure out a way to finish Digger's Big Con, the storyline I barely started in the webcomic.

Also still rattling around in my brain is the new book I want to write, the Twenties-era Johnny Dollar meets Cthulhuzilla story. And at the same time, I'm playing around with notes for a role-playing setting that I might have finished enough and be brave enough to present to friends by the time our current Atlantis game starts to wrap up in a year or so. I probably won't make any money from that, but there are a lot of indie publishers with PDF's for sale on DriveThru RPG. Somebody must be making some money. Maybe after I've run it a while, it will be something I feel confident enough to sell.

Will any of this pay my bills and make me a living? Seems doubtful. Nothing here looks like a Penny Arcade/Schlock Mercenary caliber idea. Then again, who knew that those would take off the way they did? I did have an idea once that struck me as a possible hit, but I had neither the money, nor really the desire, to pursue it to its conclusion.

The point is, no matter what's going on with my current job situation, I feel as if I need to start putting more stuff out there. I know some people will buy it. I know my work is worth paying for, because I've been paid for it by professional markets. Now I need to find the right way to connect with the right audience, and find the confidence and enthusiasm to start producing the kind of work I was producing five years ago. And hope enough people will pay for it to make it worth the effort.

Corinne Bohrer, give me strength.

Cover Test

This is more in the way of a proof of concept than anything close to a finished cover, but I think it illustrates what I'm after well enough. The scene is a stylized version of something that happens in the book (not much of a spoiler since it's mentioned on the very first page), although the death ray in the book does not put on such a light show.

It's still way too plain, especially the background, and I really want it to have a sexy woman in there somewhere, but I think my basic approach is sound (that basic approach, in case your interested, is basically doing a photo montage in GIMP, then shifting to Corel Painter Essentials 4 to render it as a painting).

More Logo Goofing Around

Looking at the logo I did, it occurred to me that it wasn't so much the shape of the font that made it seem so cartoony, but just the bright flat colors. So I toyed with muting the colors a bit and adding some grunge texture. It looks more interesting now.


I'm putting together a rough concept of a proposed cover that may take a while to finish, but right now, I've got some free time on my hands.

Picturing the Cover

So I'm contemplating ideas for the Death Wave cover, and I'm torn between the "collage of thrilling moments" approach used on 70's movie posters, or the "single, sexy, striking image that may or may not actually occur in the book."

And I've taken a first pass at a logo.



I'm not in love with the colors, and I think the font may be too comic-bookish (not surprising, since it's a Blambot font), but I kind of like the sine-wave and the overall proportions. And the final logo colors will depend on the colors of the cover image itself.

Wow, That Was Fast

Well, I sent off the novel on Friday, and on Saturday, I got an email from Charles Ardai, the editor/publisher of Hard Case Crime. And it was the nicest rejection you could imagine, but it was still a rejection.

Which leaves me in a bit of a tough spot, because it was so completely designed for them, including the length. 53,000 words is a really short novel, perfect for them, but a hard sell anywhere else. And I can't see trying to pad it out to 70-80,000 words. That's half-again what I've written already, and the story just won't support that.

And then there's the genre problem, which was part of what made Hard Case say no. Death Wave is a crime novel, a noir revenge thriller, but it has science fiction overtones and elements. Albert Einstein has an early cameo, and there's a MacGuffin which is a notebook by Philo Farnsworth, which gives it an alternate history flavor as well. And it's funny, at least in the early chapters, so it's hard to tell right at the start what kind of story it's going to be.

I tried to telegraph that ahead of time with my opening sentence, which starts with the words, "The day I baked Hyman Mankiewicz...," which at least lets you know there's death in the works (and death in some abundance, I should say), but I can see how that might throw some people off.

I suppose I could rewrite the opening to make it darker, and cut down on the speculative elements. But I wanted the book to have its own distinct flavor, and those things give it that distinctiveness.

So I'm getting ready to put together a submission for Tor, and I'll try to keep my eyes open for other possible publishers. I would really like to get onto Codex again and see if anyone there has a suggestion, but I kind of burned my bridges with them with my post-election blow-up.

Which sucks, because Codex was a great group, and I really liked the people. But I can't see going back there again.

Oh well. Just have to keep trying.

Fine-the-EFF-ally

Typed my last revision on Death Wave this afternoon. And then did probably a profoundly stupid thing--rather than read it through again to see if it's any better, or to just to catch any new or old typos, I saved the file and sent it to Hard Case Crime straightaway.

Because I've been letting my fear and lack of confidence keep me frozen into inactivity for too long. And I needed to break out of that and not give myself another excuse to delay. I needed to get that book out the door and out of my system so I can move on to other things.

And now I have.

Corinne Bohrer is cautiously optimistic.

Distractions

It has been a unique feeling for me, in the days since I finished the first draft, for me to have no interest in the manuscript whatsoever. The books I've finished before, I was on such a high after finishing that I couldn't wait to go back and start reading from the beginning, experience the whole thing in one big panorama.

I haven't done that this time. I actually started divorcing myself from the manuscript even before I finished it. After 32 or 33 days, I was sick of pushing myself, especially at the end when I could feel the failure pressing in on me. So I did the GIMP-shop that serves as my new profile photo. Then I made myself finish the manuscript, and instead of rereading it from the beginning as I formerly have, I didn't even think about it.

Instead, I started up another GIMP project. It was originally supposed to be a quick and dirty test of a concept for photoshopping a picture of a person into a superhero (and yes, I just used "photoshop" as a generic verb--if Adobe wants to sue me, they are welcome to learn just how broke I am). No, the character is not anyone you would have heard of. I just made her up as I went along, obviously ripping off the outfit from Mr. Incredible/the Flash, and going on from there.


As you can see, it eventually grew into something bigger, and is now the wallpaper on my desktop (this is a scaled-down version for web display).It's not perfect, but it's better than I expected it to turn out. If I were trying to sell this (I can't, because I have no rights to the model image I used), I'd spend a lot more time on details like making the boots and belt and bracers more realistic and improving the graphics spelling out Neutrina's name down the side.

On the other hand, the logo symbol I tossed off for the character looks pretty good, and the background, which was assembled as an afterthought, isn't horrible either. I learned some valuable lessons putting this together, and added some techniques to my toolbox, like layer modes. If I had the patience and inclination to do this all the time, I almost start to think I could make a living at it. Of course, you could say the same thing about writing, probably. Alas, I don't have the patience or inclination to become good enough at any one thing to make a living at it.

That would appear to be my doom.

Pounding It Out, Day 36

Success!

Finally.

53,000 words, give or take. It sucks, but it's done.

And maybe, once I've gotten some distance from it, I'll find out it doesn't suck as much as I think it does right now. Maybe it'll be worth fixing up and submitting to Hard Case Crime. That was my ultimate goal when I started this, and until I'm sure the book is hopeless, it's still my goal.

I'm still broke as hell, but I have some cigars left from back when I was solvent. I think I'll light one up tonight after I get back from seeing my daughter. I may even splurge on a cheap little champagne split or something. I haven't had anything worth celebrating in my life for a long time, so I want to make the most of this moment.

Corinne Bohrer wants to congratulate me in a very special way. If only.

Pounding It Out, Day 34

Well, I passed the 50,000 word mark yesterday, but the draft's not done yet. I'm in the climactic scene, though, so it should only be a day or two now. The big problem that has been slowing me down: I did a little research that convinced me my final scene was completely improbable, location-wise. So I'm completely replotting it on the fly, which is going very slowly.

My other big problem: I had decided to write a book with a main character who was a remorseless killing machine. However, I find I'm having trouble making him be that. And I'm having second thoughts about the ending I'm heading toward. I don't know if it will be satisfying, to readers or to me. And as often happens in my writing, I've engaged in some self-sabotage, writing scenes that are disturbing. Which is weird, because I know lots of people who write similar stuff that's worse and seem to have great success, yet when I try it, it always seems to misfire.

But the questions will only last at most for a couple more thousand words and then I'll be done. For the nonce.

Pounding It Out, Day 31

Failure!

And yet not.

I did not make my arbitrary deadline of 30 days. But I did not end up far off either. At midnight, I was at 47,500 and heading into the final confrontation. So on the one hand, yes, I failed. But on the other hand, I am very close and almost assured of finishing a first draft very soon. The first half drags, and the second half lurches and the climax is probably going to be entirely too short and vague, but it will be something I can build on and fix.

So "encouraging failure," like "good rejection," is not something to be sneezed at in this business.

Pounding It Out, Day 27

I finally hit the wall, and in the weirdest possible place. I'm nearly to the end--only about 8,000 words to go--and instead of picking up momentum, I'm stopped dead. I'm not sure how to get from where I am to the climax.

It feels like I have overcomplicated what was a very simple storyline. In trying to set up my denouement, I've blocked myself from the climax preceding it. So I need to either work out a way to push through this quickly, or else scrap the last thousand or so words and take a different, simpler path.

Or do what I usually do and put the manuscript down for six months or so, then see if I feel like picking it up again. Crap.

Corinne Bohrer senses disaster.

Pounding It Out, Day 25

Not a lot to add today, since I just updated progress yesterday. I'm still grinding it out, staying pretty close to pace. Past the 40,000 word mark now.

The one big thing is, back on day 8, I had mentioned a twist I'd come up with for the ending that I was debating whether to use or not. Today, I started setting up the groundwork for that twist in the text (in one sense, you could say that I've been setting up the groundwork for the entire book, but it gets sort of specific now). In fact, what I'm doing now may help me bring direction to the entire third act and make that final denouement seem less like a twist ending and more like something inevitable (although still ironic and maybe even funny, which, given what has happened in the last 90 pages I've written, might seem inappropriate).

We'll see what happens. If nothing else, I'll have something unusual to show people at parties.

Pounding It Out, Day 24

It's funny. Two days ago, I was engaged and energized. Felt like I was picking up momentum. Then yesterday, I finally finished Part Two, and now here I am feeling like I'm in a void.

I know where the book needs to go. It's just that, having come down off the intensity of the final scene of Act Two, I need some emotional space to regroup. But I can't let that translate into a work stoppage, or else the whole thing goes down in flames.

I know why I'm reluctant. I have very little structure for Act Three, I have basically three major scenes planned, but I'm starting to feel ambivalent about them all. One's too small. One's really hard to pull off. And the third one (which is the first one chronologically) I have no idea how to write without killing off my main character. I need a clever plan, but I'm exhausted from two nights in a row with very little sleep. I'm all out of clever.

And this is how I get blocked. I'm like those wussified parents who try counting to three to get their kids to obey. "One...two...two-and-a-half...two-and-three-quarters...don't make me get to three!" Truth is, the parent's afraid to get to three because there is nothing to back up the threat. So they're desperate not to get to that point and come up empty.

I'm like that when writing. I can feel that I haven't got the problem solved long before I get there. So I slow down, trying not to get there, because when I get there, I'll have nothing. I've got some transitional stuff I need to write before I get to that first big problem scene, but if I write it all now, I'll get there too soon empty-handed.

So I play computer games and read and watch TV and wash dishes and run errands. Anything to put off that reckoning.

I ended yesterday only about 300 words off pace, so the situation is in no way dire. But I can feel that inner surrender coming on again, and I've got to find a way to push it off for at least one more day. If I can push it back one day at a time for seven more days (including today), then I'll be done.

Pounding It Out, Day 22

I know, you're probably getting tired of the constant updates, but I'm doing this as much for my own future edification as for any curiosity you may have about the progress of the book.

I dropped off pace by around a thousand words yesterday, but then I got the scenes I needed kind of figured out, and between midnight and 3 p.m. today got myself almost caught up. I need another 500 words today to stay right on pace.

Plot-wise, I'll be wrapping up Act Two either today or tomorrow, so that's pretty much right on schedule as well. I had thought I would have a lot more crowded plot between the halfway point and here, but it hasn't turned out that way, and I think it's pretty much all right as it is. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do fill the space from here to the end. I have a couple of scene ideas, but only a couple. So between now and the end of the week, I'm going to need to sit down and do some serious plotting. But once I get that done, I'm pretty much rocket-fueled for the final push.

The best part for me, right now, is that I seem to have gotten past that crisis-of-confidence point, where I was feeling totally lost and thinking I was just one day away from sputtering to a complete halt, and am now starting to feel kind of energized and enthusiastic again. One week and a wake-up...

Pounding It Out, Day 20

Well, it's official: I've surpassed my previous word count record (in truth, I may have written more words in some months, when I was coming down the stretch of Hero Go Home or Blue Falcon--seriously, one awesome thing about making it to the end of a book is that the last 50 pages or so fucking fly).

But as of the end of the 19th, I was only about 300 words off my goal pace, so somewhere around 31,300. On Friday, I fell off my pace by over 1000 words; I was not only stuck, but I went to visit friends for the evening, which killed my writing that night (which is not a complaint--I had a good time and good discussion). But today I ended up writing the big middle scene that I had spent time working up before I started the draft, so a lot of that was sort of already blueprinted, which made the words fly by.

The last time I tried this, I only managed 28,500 for the entire month. But I'm still hanging on to my finished-in-30-days pace, and though I may fall off that pace between now and the end of the month (this kind of thing gets sort of mentally exhausting after a while), I have gotten so far now that I'm virtually assured of making it through to the end eventually.

Whether I'll have anything worth anything when I'm done is anyone's guess.

Today I'm heading into the end of act two, in which our 'hero' (who has turned into a seriously bad, even evil guy over the course of the book) tries to accomplish his goal and fails miserably. Everything goes seriously, seemingly irrevocably wrong for him (and no, I don't know exactly what that means--I just know that it needs to happen somehow--fuck, I hate this part of the book!).

Pounding It Out, Day 18

I'm officially hitting the wall now. Still pretty much on pace as of midnight, but will probably fall behind significantly starting today.

I'm past the halfway point, into the hardest part of the book for me, which is taking all the specific threads I've written into the manuscript so far and fitting them into the outline, which has by this point turned into the vaguest of vague allusions ("at some point, he'll kidnap this guy and get some piece of information out of him which will give him the clue to how to do the big climactic thing" when neither point nor guy nor information nor big climax exist even as ideas yet). I had been writing to more or less a decent plot outline, although I invented a lot to fill in. But when I passed halfway, I lost almost all of that.

And in writing the first half, I forgot to introduce several supporting characters on which the second half hinges; having those characters established would make the second half much easier to write. Not to mention that I have become extremely uneasy about the plausibility of the big halfway twist, upon which the entire book depends. So no pressure or anything.

Meanwhile, I just read Richard Stark's Nobody Runs Forever. Okay, this will sound stupid, probably because it is. I have long admired Richard Stark from second-hand, because I'd read about how much Stephen King admired him. Stark was the pseudonym under which Donadl Westlake wrote his series of hard-boiled crime novels starring the thief, Parker. And reading King's description of Stark's writing, it was almost as if I'd read it myself, but I never had. I just imagined what it would be like.

So when I started this book, I had Stark as an inspiration, but not the real Stark--the imaginary Stark I'd pictured from King's descriptions. Well, I finally got around to reading one of the Parker novels, and my book is nothing like that. Which isn't necessarily bad. I think what I'm writing may be closer to James M. Cain, whose books I had read before (altough in Reader's Digest condensed versions that my mom had lying around, so some would say I haven't read those, either).

But I will probably take some inspiration from Stark. The writing is very economical, fast-moving, unsentimental. Strangely enough, I've been struggling for years to bring more emotion into my writing, so it's an interesting thought to try to leach it back out.

But it's clear now that I'm going to need some major revisions to make this book work, and it's getting harder to drive on with the weight of those mistakes behind me, knowing htat I need to make changes both big and small to the first half of the book, and those changes will be reflected in the second half of the book, meaning what I write now is sort of doubly irrelevant. Not only will it need to be rewritten on its own merits, but it may need to be fundamentally changed due to changes in the first half. I feel like that dork who starts telling a long, involved joke, then halfway through says, "Wait a minute, I'm telling it wrong. I forgot this big part. Let me start over."

But there's no way I quit now, go back and start making revisions to the first half. Then I'd never get to the end. That way lies madness.

Pounding It Out, Day 15, and a Vault Extra

Well, I'm still managing to stay almost exactly on pace, which is good, but at the same time...

If you read enough books about novel writing, you'll come across things like this:

Everyone, at some point, sees their novel as a lost cause. The characters are one-dimensional. The plot isn't going anywhere. The language is abysmal.

--No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty

One thing I've come to recognize is that I tend to run into a wall at a certain point in all my books...It's around that point that I find myself losing confidence in the book--or more precisely, in my ability to make it work. The plot seems to be either too simple and straightforward to hold the reader's interest or too complicated to be neatly resolved. I find myself worrying that there's not enough action, that the lead's situation is not sufficiently desperate, that the book has been struck boring while my attention was directed elsewhere.

--Writing the Novel from Plot to Print by Lawrence Block

I've been experiencing exactly that this week. It feels as if I've spent much of the last thirty pages or so just barely crawling along, marking time until the next big scene. It's not as bad as Hero Go Home, in which I spend nearly all of Act Two doing just that, but it still feels boring. The book may not be as bad as I've thought, but for the last couple of days, before I started writing, I've had that feeling of, "This is starting to really suck. Is all this effort really worth it? Who could possibly find this interesting?"

And the worst part of this feeling is that I've finally hit the big mid-book turning point. I wrote the first part of it today, and it wasn't easy. I try to write with a light touch, usually, funny and light, eliding over the really dark parts and heavy emotions, because I don't think I can write them convincingly.

And this scene is rather dark and brutal. There are no laugh lines (although there are punch lines, ha ha), and it goes on for a while. It has to go on for a while, because between this scene and the next, the emotional landscape is going to change rather drastically for the main character, and he can't just sort of be thrown there. He has to be dragged there, and it has to hurt every inch of the way.

And it's hard to write this sort of thing and not end up with some sort of violence porn, where you're dwelling on the violence for the sheer shock of it, and at some point, sort of getting off on how well you're describing it and kind of hoping the reader gets off on it, too.

Because you can't bore the reader, and you can't make the reader turn away or put it down. You have to keep the reader reading, so in some way, even when you're writing something unpleasant, you have to make it on some level compelling and even attractive. And that's hard to do without becoming exploitative.

So anyway, that's where I am right now--not just having to psych myself up for the daily challenge of "how do I link this scene into what's gone before and tie it into what happens next and keep all the characters consistent and honest and believable," but also having to pick up the considerably larger psychic load of, "how do I keep plodding through this piece of shit when I know everything I've done so far sucks?"

So anyway, to end on a lighter note, remember Saturday when I said, "No one reads Corben's comics for the stories?"

Well, here's an example of what they do read his comics for, from "Den II" in the May 1982 issue of Heavy Metal:

Corinne Bohrer is turned on...

Pounding It Out, Day 13

Going into Sunday, I'm barely hanging on. I was several hundred words short Friday, 500 words short by midnight Saturday, but kept pushing through to make my Saturday word count, plus a little, by 1:00 a.m. this morning.

It's hard because I'm into Act II now, the big, swampy middle as it's called, getting into territory where I had only a very loose outline. Imagine driving from New York to Los Angeles, trying to navigate with a globe of the world and a magnifying glass. New York is marked and Los Angeles is marked, so you know where they are in relation to one another, and you see the terrain in between, but there are no roads marked. You know the roads around the New York area pretty well, and you've driven around to neighboring states some, so you got going just fine. But now you're somewhere like Kentucky and nothing looks familiar at all, so you just keep pushing generally south and west, knowing that eventually you'll hit the ocean and then all you have to do is head down the coast till you run into it.

That's what writing a novel is like for me. On Angel Baby, I got lost and gave up around St. Louis. On Flip, I took a couple of wrong turns, ended up in Nebraska (home of WoTF quarterly winner Matt Rotundo! Hi, Matt!) and quit. On Stripped, I got to Las Vegas and said, Screw it, close enough" and settled down.

I've tried to outline more carefully every time I've started a new project, but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. I started this book with a pretty good grasp on the overall structure of the story, and perhaps more importantly, a more extensive backstory for the characters than I'd ever had before, so the problems seem to be solving themselves pretty handily as I go along. I'm speeding right toward the book's major twist, not a surprise twist, really, but the major turn that's going to change the kind of story it was into the kind of story it will be.

For the "Star Wars" geeks out there, this is Luke Skywalker deciding to rescue the Princess. For the entire movie thus far, the story has been "Dodge the Empire and get the droids to Alderaan." Then it turns out Alderaan's been blown up, and the Falcon has been captured by the Death Star, and our heroes have no idea what to do. They know they need to escape, but after they escape, they've got nothin'. Then Luke finds out the Princess is being held on board, and now he's got a new purpose and a new resolve: rescue the Princess and get her back to the rebels, which sets up everything that happens in the second half of the movie.

Then again, the twist I've got coming up could be seen as more of a first act twist, like Luke discovering his aunt and uncle have been killed. And since I heard Friday that Hard Case Crime is looking for longer manuscripts than 50,000 words, more in the neighborhood of 75,000, you could make the argument that 25,000 words is a decent place for a first act twist (a little late for a first act, but it depends on the story, really). Except that I don't know how much story I can fill with after this twist. My plot outline gets more barren the farther it goes. So for right now, I'm calling myself halfway through until my plot proves different.

Pounding It Out, Day 1

I started writing the novel just a little after midnight. The working title is Death Wave. Hokey, I know, but when you read the book (assuming I finish it, of course), I think the tone will fit.

The writing went pretty well, but then, the first day always does. I sometimes spend days thinking about the opening before I write it, playing the scene, tuning the language in my head, so when I actually start typing, the first few pages roll out pretty fast.

I didn't do that so much this time; the scene I mostly toyed with was one that occurs roughly halfway through, by my reckoning, a scene that helped me really get a handle on my main character and the tone of the book. But I had toyed a lot with the opening sections, too, so it went pretty smoothly.

I only did about 1,000 words, though, and by the NanoWriMo chart, I need to average around 1670 a day to get to 50,000 in thirty. But after I've slept some and checked the job listings, I'll have the rest of the day to make up those 670 words. I'll probably get pushed out a little bit ahead.

I don't want to kill myself, obviously. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and I tend to flare early and burn out quick. But I hope that doesn't happen this time, and I have some small reason to hope.